Text to speech is very close to being able to replace voice actors for a lot of lower budget content. Voice cloning will let directors and creators get just the sound they want for their characters, imagine being able to say "I want something that sounds like Harrison Ford with a French accent." Of course, there are going to be debates about how closely you can clone someone's voice/diction/etc, both extremes are wrong - perfect cloning will hurt artists without bringing extra value to directors/creators, but if we outlaw things that sound similar the technology will be neutered to uselessness.
Years ago The Indiana Jones podcast show made a feature length radio adventure drama (with copyright blessing for music/story of indiana jones) and it has a voice actor that sounds 98% exactly like harrison ford. No one was hurt by it because cultural artefacts rely on mass distribution first.
As someone involved in the AI creator sphere, that's a very cold take. Big studios pay top shelf voice talent to create the best possible experience because they can afford it. Do you think Blizzard is using AI to voice Diablo/Overwatch/Warcraft? Of course not. On the other hand, there are lots of small indie games being made now that utilize TTS, because the alternative is no voice, the voice of a friend or a very low quality voice actor.
Do I want to have people making exact clones of voice actors? No. The problem is that if you say "You can't get 90% close to an existing voice actor" then the technology will be able to create almost no human voices, it'll constantly refuse like gemini, even when the request is reasonable. This technology is incredibly powerful and useful, and we shouldn't avoid using it because it'll force a few people to change careers.
You want a world where only the rich can create beautiful experiences. You're either rich or short sighted.
Edit: If you've got a cadre of volunteer voice actors that don't suck hidden somewhere, you need to share buddy. That's the only way your comments make sense.
I don't know what else to tell you, I just think people deserve to be paid for the work they do.
Your vision of a world where anyone can create voice for their projects for cheap CAN NOT exist without someone getting exploited. Nor is it sustainable, really.
You said they this world would be worth some people losing their careers, but what do we gain? More games/audiobooks of questionable quality? Is this really worth fucking a whole profession over?
We agree that people should be paid for the work that they *DO*. Your view smacks of elitism, and voice actors don't have any more right to be able to make decent money peddling their voice than indie game devs have to peddle games with synthetic voices.
Your view smacks of contempt for workers, particularly in the arts. Specially the emphasis on "do", as if voice actors don't actually work, and just live of royalties or something. The kind of worldview that the rich and the delusioned working poor tend to share.
Professions disappear, it's a natural side effect of progress. Stablehands aren't really that common anymore, because most people drive cars instead of horses.
I really hope we can deprecate a whole bunch of professions related to fossil fuels, including coal miners and oil drillers etc.
I sympathise with the people working in those professions, I do, but times change and professions come and go, and I don't buy the argument that we should stop inventing new stuff because it might outcompete people.
As for positive uses of this technology, it might be used to immortalise a voice actor. For example Sir David Attenborough probably won't be around forever, but thanks to this technology, his iconic voice might be!
You have a narrow view of what a beautiful experience is. It does not require professional-level voice acting.
It is not unfair that, in order to have voice acting, you must have someone perform voice acting. You don't have the natural right to professional-level voice acting for free, nor do you need it to create beautiful things.
The tech is simply something that may be possible, and it has tradeoffs, and claiming that it's an accessibility problem does not grant you permission to ignore the tradeoffs.
> You don't have the natural right to professional-level voice acting for free
I also don't have the natural right to work as a professional-level voice actor.
"Natural rights" aren't really a thing, the phrase is a thought-terminating cliché we use for the rhetorical purpose of saying something is good or bad without having to justify it further.
> The tech is simply something that may be possible, and it has tradeoffs, and claiming that it's an accessibility problem does not grant you permission to ignore the tradeoffs.
A few times as a kid, I heard the meme that the American constitution allows everything then tells you what's banned, the French one bans everything then tells you what's allowed, and the Soviet one tells you nothing and arrests you anyway.
It's not a very accurate meme, but still, "permission" is the wrong lens: it's allowed until it's illegal. You want it to be illegal to replace voice actors with synthetic voices, you need to campaign to make it so as this isn't the default. (Unlike with using novel tech for novel types of fraud, where fraud is already illegal and new tech doesn't change that).
The lightness with which you treat forcing tens of thousands of people to change their career is absurd. Indie games are hardly suffering for a lack of voice acting, even if you only look at it from a market perspective and ignore that voice acting is a creative interpretation and not simply reading the words the way the director wants.
Yes, we should avoid using it because it will upend the lives of a significant amount of artists for the primary benefit of "some indie games will have more voice acting and big game companies will be able to save money on voice actors". That's not worth it, how could you think it is?
Suppose all existing voice actors, and, to be maximally generous, everyone who had spent >1 year training to be a voice actor, was given a pension for some years, paying them the greater of their current income or some average voice actor income. And then there would be no limits on using AI voices to substitute for voice actors.
Would you be happy with that outcome, or do you have another objection?
> The lightness with which you treat forcing tens of thousands of people to change their career is absurd.
Only tens of thousands? Cute. For most of the 2010s, I was expecting self-driving cars to imminently replace truck drivers, which is a few millions in the US alone and I think around 40-45 million worldwide. I still do expect AI to replace humans for driving, I just don't know how long it will take. (I definitely wasn't expecting "creative artistry" to be an easier problem than "don't crash a car", I didn't appreciate that nobody minds if even 90% of the hands have 6 fingers while everyone minds if a car merely equals humans by failing to stop in 1 of every (3.154e7 seconds per year * 1.4e9 vehicles / 30000 human driving fatalities per year ~= 1.47e+12) seconds of existence).
Almost every nation used to be around 90% farm workers, now it's like 1-5% (similar numbers to truckers) and even those are scared of automation; the immediate change was to factory jobs, but those too have shifted into service roles because of automation of the former, and the rest are scared of automation (and outsourcing).
Those service-sector roles? "Computer" used to be a job; Graphical artists are upset about Stable Diffusion; Anyone working with text, from Hollywood script writers to programmers to lawyers, is having to justify their own wages vs. an LLM (for now, most of us are winning this argument; but for how long?)
We get this wrong, it's going to be a disaster; we get it right, we're all living better the 0.1%.
> Indie games are hardly suffering for a lack of voice acting, even if you only look at it from a market perspective and ignore that voice acting is a creative interpretation and not simply reading the words the way the director wants.
I tried indie game development for a bit. I gave up with something like £1,000 in my best year. (You can probably double that to account for inflation since then).
This is because the indie game sector is also not suffering from a lack of developer talent, meaning there's a lot of competition that drives prices below the cost of living. Result? Hackathons where people compete for the fun of it, not for the end product. Those hackathons are free to say if they do or don't come with rules about GenAI; but in any case, they definitely come with no budget.
> Yes, we should avoid using it because it will upend the lives of a significant amount of artists for the primary benefit of "some indie games will have more voice acting and big game companies will be able to save money on voice actors". That's not worth it, how could you think it is?
Why do you think those textile workers lost the argument?
And to pre-empt what I think is a really obvious counter, I would also add that the transition we face must be handled with care and courtesy to the economic fears — to all those who read my comment and think "and therefore this will be easy and we should embrace it, just dismiss the nay-sayers as the Luddites they are": why do you think Karl Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto?
Probably not, because the voice actors are a community draw. In fact, one of the top threads in the overwatch subreddit right now is pictures of all the voice actors. They go to cons and interact with fans and they don't cost so much that losing that value to save a few bucks is worth it.
Based on the way consumers have behaved over my 30-odd years of life, I seriously doubt they will care enough about the fates of voice actors, developers or any other folks who are mistreated or discarded in the project of creating yet another Call of Duty iteration. We're an atomized society thats being trained all day every day to just purchase things, consequences be damned. I want to believe you are right but I suspect you are not. I suspect you are coping and to be honest, I want to do that too.
There are some cases where that's true, but people connect with actors too, which is why a AAA star will get paid 20+ million dollars to just associate their name with a project.
I think the truth will be in the middle. Nobody's choosing AI over Brad Pitt or Henry Cavill, and in the various niches I think the highest performing humans will still do very well. Overwatch is a good example of that, see https://blizzardwatch.com/2018/01/24/rolling-stone-calls-ove.... AI is going to destroy the bottom of the barrel though, stuff like Fiverr and a lot of mediocre trained voice actors are going to have to get better or change careers.
It is creating a new and fully customisable voice actor that perfectly matches a creative vision.
To the extent that a skilled voice actor can already blend existing voices together to get, say, French Harrison Ford, for it to be evil for a machine to do it would require it to be evil for a human to do it.
Small indie creators have a budget of approximately nothing, this kind of thing would allow them to voice all NPCs in some game rather than just the main quest NPCs. (And that's true even in the absence of LLMs to generate the flavour text for the NPCs so they're not just repeating "…but then I took an arrow to the knee" as generic greeting #7 like AAA games from 2011).
Big studios may also use this for NPCs to the economic detriment of current voice actors, but I suspect this will be a tech which leads to "induced demand"[0] — though note that this can also turn out very badly and isn't always a good thing either: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_gin
I don't disagree with the thought that large companies are going to try to use these technologies too, with typical lack of ethics in many cases.
But some of this thinking is a bit like protesting the use of heavy machinery in roadbuilding/construction, because it displaces thousands of people with shovels. One difference with this type of technology is that the means to use it doesn't require massive amounts of capital like the heavy machinery example, so more of those shovel-weilders will be able to compete with those that are only bringing captial to the table.
I'm not saying that this should be forbidden or something. I just wonder what is the motivation for the people pitching and actually developing this. I'm all for basic, non-profit-driven, research, but at some point you gotta ask yourself "what am I helping create here?"
Saying something is evil would seem to suggest that you think it should be forbidden. Maybe you should choose a different word if that’s not your intention.
